Where did this idea of color teams come from? Black Hat, Blue, Pink, Red. What are people missing out on when they skip Blue Team? At what stage of the proposal should the Pink Team Review happen? What needs to happen so I have no surprises at Red Team Review? In what ways does this color team review function test the maturity of our organization? These are just a few of the questions that we cover in this episode where we talk about how to turn color team reviews from perfunctory to hard-hitting and productive.
Where did this idea of color teams come from? Black Hat, Blue, Pink, Red. What are people missing out on when they skip Blue Team? At what stage of the proposal should the Pink Team Review happen? What needs to happen so I have no surprises at Red Team Review? In what ways does this color team review function test the maturity of our organization? These are just a few of the questions that we cover in this episode where we talk about how to turn color team reviews from perfunctory to hard-hitting and productive.
Welcome to GovCon Growth Bytes Hey industry. And welcome back to episode six of Gov Con Growth Bites. Your source for expert advice and key strategies to grow your business. One byte at a time! I'm your host, Maggie Bennett, and I am joined today by Robert Turner, CEO of rTurner Solutions. And we are talking about effective color team. Everybody's favorite topic. But we're going to get into the nitty gritty of the stages, the whys, the what fors and how to do it better. First, let me say a quick thank you to our client of the day for providing the following feedback quote. This afternoon I received an email stating our company had been awarded GSA Stars III GWAC. This is huge for us and allows us to carry our work from Stars II to III. I can't thank you and your team enough for making this happen. Looking forward to yet more future wins. End quote. That was S.R., the principal of his company. And, sir, we are extremely excited for you. Glad to have supported you. And we also look forward to yet more future wins for the listener. If you would like to leave us a review on any of our favorite podcast platforms or on any of our social media, is about this podcast, about a way that we have served your company. We would love to shout out your company on a future episode as well as give a mug to the next five reviewers. We've got some beautiful hand thrown, hand painted, custom designed, you know, a solid mug that can actually wrap your whole hand around. It's pretty excellent, pretty colors, all the things. But enough of that. Let's get into it. Robert, founder and president of rTurner Solutions. You've been providing business development support to GovCon for the last ten years. Greetings. Welcome back. Thanks, Maggie. Glad to be here. Glad to have you, as always. So let's get right into this. Where did the even the general idea of color teams come from in the first place? That's good. That's you know, I don't claim to have done any exhaustive research on the topic, I am not a historian but I think that we all give credit to Shipley and associate Steve Shipley, who did some great work many, many years ago in building out the Shipley process for business development for the government . And, you know, I don't know, 96, 97 steps. I think he he outlined in a very detailed, very effective process that that industry firms, large and small, adapt to their own purposes. Right. Play around and and color teams are the he is he assigned colors to the basic review sessions that you do throughout the process. All right. So what would those colors be? Well, again, I don't know what all of them are, but the ones we usually talk about, black, blue, green, pink, red, gold and white makeup, which which would you say you land on the most often in your work? Well, if you're talking about building the proposal, everybody talks about pink team and red team reviews. If you're reviewing pricing, that's a green team review. Green's in dollars. How about that? Excellent. If if you're doing if you're if you're doing a competitive review, then of course, you're talking about a black hat review. And then a solution session is usually put under the heading of Blue. Right. Your final final review is Gold Team after everything is packaged up. And then a white glove review is usually done in the hard copy page by page, you know, to just check, you know, to just dusted off and, you know, kind of smooth out all the edges, you know, various. I have worked with a lot of different firms and it's always good to double check various companies reap, you know, they'll recolor things, rename them, have their own little methodology. But I think what I just outlined is pretty, pretty standard, pretty good place to start from really well, given how extensive Steve's development of this color team process was, I wish we had time to go into every single stage of them. But in the in the small bites that we're going for today, why don't we key in on, you know, the most popular pink and red? And then I feel like I don't really hear a lot about blue teams. So why don't we actually start there? Why don't we talk about, you know, what, what is a blue team and are we missing out when we skip it? Right. So but one of the primary I talk about blue teams a lot with my clients when we're onboarding new consultants, when we're helping customers deconstruct what may have gone wrong. Blue team not doing a blue team I think is one of the largest contributors to. Proposals that are not as good as they could be. Proposals that lose eke. Or just a broken process. Right. So what is a blue team? A blue team is your solution session. So for every proposal that you're writing to the government, the government is asking for something. Sometimes it's as simple as I want four of these and five of these types of people. And I wanted to start on this date and they need to have this resume. Okay. So it's just an easy staffing problem. Sometimes they're asking for a technical solution to their requirements. Sometimes it gets more complex than that. Right? But usually for every proposal that you're writing, there's some kind of solution that you're building. Even if you don't think about the service you're providing as a solution, it is a solution. What too many clients and vendors and business development teams miss out on is they skip the blue team. They go right from an outline of the RFP and they try to go right to pink team as quickly as possible and just start writing. Just give the annotated outline to your technical people and have them go write. Because we do all this and we know how to do this and we've done this before and just make the assumption that everybody knows what to do. And I think it's that assumption that gets us into trouble, right? Absolutely. I think that's a a risky thing to do in any stage is to make any assumptions that that everyone's on the same page, but, you know, you're going for. Right. And it's kind of it's kind of supported by this assumption that every agency is looking at these problems the same way. Well, every agency is different and every office is different. And sometimes every RFP is a little bit different. And if you had turnover in your team recently and their process at their previous establishment was different. That's right. That's right. So it's always good to to take time out, even if it's only for an hour or two. You know, the one thing about following a good process will do for you is that it is that it keeps your it keeps your project on track. And it's one more it's it's one more help in your quality of delivering a great proposal. Right. I always say that proposals and business development projects fail for one of two reasons. One, you don't follow good process, or two, you want to resource them. Well, what we're talking about is a component of the process, right. So just because it's a just because it's there doesn't mean it needs to take all day or two days. You know, if you're under a compressed timeline, if you're dealing with a short with a smaller proposal, something that's maybe not as complex, don't make the assumption that I don't need to do something. Just do it faster. Sure. So one thing that can make a blue team more effective is not not skipping it, but also another effective key is to to not drag it out, you know, to be. Yeah, don't make it out to be more than don't make it out to be more than it needs to be. But do take the time to get your capture, lead your technical, lead your management, leads your pricing guys. Get people together to talk about what are the issues in this company and how do we need to structure our solution in order to win and have that discussion before you get into the writing of the proposal? And there's lots of great resources to help you do that. So speaking of getting into the writing of the proposal, I know in my experiences as a writer, I have occasionally sort of jumped the gun and just word vomited all over the page, which I feel like may not be the best product to take into a pink team review. I can see you shaking your head over here. So what? At what stage should the pink team review? Hopefully not post word vomit. That's right. Well, so so pink team is usually your first is thought of, you know and it's pink, right. So it's a light color. It's not supposed to be too deep. It's not supposed to be too full. It's your first kind of gentle draft of your proposal. Right. But one of the mistakes that I've seen way too many clients and proposal teams make is they rush to get. 50% of your content full. Get the pages full on Pink team Almost working from the assumption that if. If I get my pink, if I get a lot of content to Pink team then I must have done a great job. Right. Like the more pages I've written by Pink Team Hey, look how far ahead I am. Aren't I doing a great job, right? Well, so that kind of breaks the process that Shipley really laid out for us. And I think one of the while, we're not always writing a proposal for Joint Strike Fighter, you know, it's good to follow the process. So what does a process say? The process says that Pink team should be a good solid outline review. Okay, take your proposal and outline it, but don't just put the headings in there. Drive down to the paragraph level to the subheading level, but don't write those sections, outline them yet. Talk about what you're going to say, what components of your capability are you bringing to bear? How are you going to use your ISO standards? What corporate experience are you going to quote? How are you going to talk about your team evaluation factors or this part? How are you going to link in all the, you know, the statement of work and the construction evaluation factor? What what are you going to say within your proposal? But do that at an outline level so that when you get to pink team, your reviewer can see the structure of your proposal and then you can go through a critical review to say, are we saying the right thing? And you don't need you don't need 1500 words to come to that conclusion. You need you do need that outline so that you're not encumbered by all of the components of English language that make up a paragraph. And, you know, you also have taken the time to do that writing. You're still operating at a strategic, conceptual level so that you can frame up your proposal properly. Then when you do the review, your reviewers are able to ask critical, hard questions about the solution you're offering and how you're presenting it to your customer in a way that you really can't do at when you when you filled the page with words. Yeah. If I'm so bogged down with vocabulary choices and punctuation choices and does this narrative make sense, it's less about the strategy of the of the product you're delivering and of the solution that you're outlining. And it's more about just getting it's getting so many pages covered. Yeah. And I think during during your preparation for pink teams or during that pink team creation process that comes before the review, another good thing to give yourself time for is to create your conceptual information. Graphics. Graphics too often are created after the fact rather than before the fact. So if you look at your out, if you look at the outline of your section, you can say to yourself, What am I trying to say? And How do I say that in an infographic? Then build the infographic and write to the graphic rather than writing and building your graphic around your writing to build your graphic around the writing is the backwards way to do it. Build your graphic to describe the key components of your solution and what you want to communicate to your customer, and then let your writing come out of the graphic. But to do that, you have to do all these things at the right time. So it sounds much more strategic. And again, sort of echoing the blue team theory is that, you know, you don't have to you don't have to drag it out, don't make it more than it is, but also make it a strategic effective to do all these things in an hour or two. You can do them in 45 minutes if you've got a really small proposal, but it's important to do them, and it's important to do the right steps at the right time so that you, you know, you wouldn't you wouldn't pour the foundation for your house after you've already put the walls up. Same kind of concepts And with those smaller proposals, the more we practice that effective blue team painting, then when those honkin ones come around, it is a more streamlined process. We're more effective team. And so rather than just having a single step that we're really good at the whole process, you know, I mean, it's I think , you know, just like you don't, you know, you don't want to send your you don't want to send your client a lousy proposal. You know, it's it's all tips over here from tips. It's almost like dating, right? You don't want to take you don't want to take your girlfriend out to, you know, to some dive and, you know, so she comes away with the wrong impression of you. You would never do that. So why would you send your customer a lousy third rate? You know, kind of kind of unraveled proposal. You would never want to do that. Right. So in the same way that you don't want to send your customer a bad proposal, you want to take. You want every proposal to be a good training opportunity for your team so that your team and everybody on your team works through the process, does it right. And then at some point, all that becomes muscle memory and your organization reacts and and does things in the in a winning way because that's the way we've always done it. Sounds like that could also be a really great way to help improve company culture and get your team really cohesive. Yeah, I mean, there's really nothing like a proposal, a federal government proposal to test the maturity or organization because so many things come out. It's human nature to be proud of our work. But in federal government proposals, you need to you need to distance yourself from what you've created and you need to devoid yourself of of this attachment to the quality of what I've written. And you need to be able to look at it objectively. Don't, don't, don't, don't fall victim to pride of authorship. Let somebody critique you do good work, but then hold it up for review. Well, that's that's a hard thing to do, right? Like, people don't do that naturally because, you know, it's human nature to take all that stuff personally. Well, but you can't do that. You have to give it your best. And then you have to say in the given period of time that I have with the resources that I was provided and how much time I had and how much energy I had, this is the best thing I could create. So. So do your best. And then let somebody critique it. So then the so then the the the reviewer then has a has a responsibility to not make it personal. But then the author needs to have enough self-confidence that they don't take it too personally. And then we can all work together in a constructive manner with an end goal in mind of creating a great product, not by trying to win political points. If if the proposal turns into just a political mud throwing contest, then, you know, that doesn't that doesn't help anybody either. So all this this whole thing really often has a tendency to push on the maturity of an organization. And. Yeah, so it's something to look at. Absolutely. What sort of things do we need to look forward to as we approach a red team review? I don't feel like that's a place we want. A lot of surprises happening, right? So Red Team should be your final draft review. Red Team should be a good solid product. And if you have looked at your competition before the RFP came out, if you have done a good solution session in your blue team, if you've worked an effective process through Pink Team Review and you've been you've been working hard and well together as a team, by the time you get to Red Team, it shouldn't be a surprise. You should have a good solid draft that's almost ready to submit, but without doing all the things that come before it, and without working well together as a team and without having a good, well-structured process, Red Team is just another opportunity to do a food fight, to turn into a food fight or a bang on your proposal or to, you know, yeah, I know it's red team, but we've got a hole over here. Well, so you're really not ready for it, right? Well, so now you're process kind of broken, you're just kind of doing it like, why are you doing it right? It just the third leg line. That's right. Just put in. Exactly. It's not really a red team. So, you know, red team should be there to force the entire team to get their final drafts in and everything should be tied together. And you're looking at red team. At Red Team, you're not looking for big rocks. You're looking for small things. You're you've already validated and created a winning solution. You already know how you're going to support it with your corporate experience. And now you're looking at at the more granular levels, section by section, which is what you should be doing toward the end. The issues that you address toward the end get smaller and smaller. They're still important, but they build on the fact and they're supported by the fact that you've already put the right building blocks in place. So those building blocks are going to be key. And I think that it also sounds like there is there's a level of of just a just adult communication of expectations and just knowing what what to expect of each other, what to expect of your team, what to expect of yourself. And when you come to that red team review, if everybody knows what. The expectations are, then it'll be it'll be a much clearer process, much more of an effective color team as as we were talking about. And I think that ties back into the Pink team. Like when you have that outline, it's really strong. Everyone knows what's supposed to be there. They know what their their role is. So the they seem to build into each other. The pink team supports really supports the red. That's absolutely true. Right. Every every every step in the process builds upon the success that you've done in the previous step. And when you when you rush over things, when you forget things, you're leaving holes. You're you're you're you're creating risk where really you shouldn't have to create that risk. If you if you follow the process and you make the process work for you, then by the time you get to the end, you know, life is good. Yeah, it's awesome. It sounds like a little bit of an ideal situation for you or for folks who have a lot of experience and that maturity in their organization you were talking about earlier. So what would you advise to a team that that is asking those hard questions? Is looking at their team really look at this. This has promise we're getting there, but we're not as effective as I would like to be this for this specific effort. This specific proposal is a really big deal. I don't have a lot of confidence in the maturity of my team at this specific stage in our development. So what would you say to them if they're there working in that place? Right. So if you're at that place and you've got I mean, that's those are great opportunities to bring in third parties, bring in consultants, bring in folks who have experience with those kinds of deals. And and you could be I mean, one of the great things about hiring, consulting and, you know, not to do a shameless plug for our own services, but, you know, you can hire a consultant for a specific scope of work. A consultant could really help you validate your outline and your approach, your schedule and who's on your team and who's doing what. If you've got a question about that, hire a consultant, come in, do a review, look at what you've got and then give you some give you some critical objective feedback. Another really good use of consultants and third parties is in your as members of your color team review panel because they're not they they they usually don't have a vested interest in your company meaning that they're not they're not politically related to the specific outcomes or the specific agendas of anybody there particularly. They can then they can they can call. They can point out where something is really well done. But at the same time, if you've got an ugly baby sitting in the corner, they can tell you the baby's ugly because that's what they're hired to do. You know, they're not hired to set up a family dinner having called the baby. That's right. They could. They. They can. They can they can tell you where you've fallen down and, you know, dragged mud all over the carpet. Right. And they don't have to overlook it, like, oh, I can't talk about that because that'll make somebody mad. Well, they're hired to talk about that stuff and it's really that ability color team reviews are more effective when when everybody is committed to respectful dialog, but also constructive criticism and being critical because you don't you want to submit the best product possible. You can only submit the best product possible when you have people who are critically looking at what you're creating and pushing the team to do its best. Excellent. It's really helpful. I appreciate that. For those who maybe were tuning in and hoping to hear a little bit more about the black hat or the green team or the white glove, where can the listener find you? Get in touch, ask more questions about us. Yeah. So reach out to us. rTurner.net is our website. Robert@rTurner.net is my email. I actually have an entire briefing recorded as a training session. It's up on our ecommerce store called Effective Color Team Reviews. That's available for folks. And as always, we're happy to answer questions or have further conversations where we can help anyone with these ideas. Excellent. Thank you. And I and I happen to know that your your phone number is also on that website as well. At rTurner.net, you're also available via LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn, Maggie Bennett, and we have a company page there as well as a company page on Twitter if you want to follow along. Right. We're doing episodes. We're doing our best to be as available, doing all those things. We want to be available. We want to make noise. We want to provide you guys with some little growth bytes to get you through. If you want to leave us feedback on any of those aforementioned platforms. Twitter, LinkedIn, your favorite podcast platform. Again, we'd love to give you a shout out on an upcoming episode and send a mug to the first five reviewers on a given platform. Any other any other last minute? It's been good. Maggie, thanks for your time today. Love it. Let's call it a day and get back to work. Have a great one. Thank you for your time.